What went down at the Q1'2019 GitLab Hackathon

The GitLab community again gathered on Feb. 12-13 for the Q1 hackathon and I am excited this is becoming a regular fixture for the wider community. As we did in the 2018 Hackathons, we welcomed several first-time contributors and again set a new record for community contributions over two days.

So what did we accomplish?

One of the key goals of the event is to encourage community members to contribute Merge Requests (MRs), and the community delivered 67 of them, with 49 merged as of Mar. 6. You can check out the status of MRs at Hackathon Community MRs. Beyond the number of MRs, what was also impressive was community's participation across a wide variety of GitLab projects including Charts and Runner. I also want to highlight an MR where our Core Team member Takuya Noguchi fixed typos from blog posts going back several years. I thought this was pretty amazing, and is a great example of how diverse contributions can be.

We also introduced Priority MRs during this Hackathon where GitLab Product Managers identified key issues where they wanted help from the wider community. This turned out to be a great success as community members tackled five key issues, with three MRs already merged. With the success of Priority MRs, I'm thinking of ways to make this an ongoing activity outside of Hackathons, and I'll have more updates on this soon.

When is the next Hackathon?

We will be having another Hackathon in the second half of May 2019, and will announce the dates in April. Please stay tuned for further announcements on Twitter, the GitLab Community room in Gitter, Reddit, and other channels. More importantly, if you have any suggestions for topics and/or feedback on last month's event, please mention them on the GitLab Community room in Gitter to help us improve future Hackathons.

Hackathon prizes

As we announced at the Hackathon kickoff, everyone who had MRs merged will receive a token of our appreciation for their contribution. During the recent Hackathon period, 21 people had MRs merged and the "grand prize" winner with most MRs merged is another Core Team member Robert Schilling, with 10 merged MRs. There is also an additional prize for people who have Priority MRs merged.

Thanks and congratulations to everyone!

How do I get started with contributing?

A good place to start is the Contributing to GitLab page, where you can learn how you can contribute to GitLab code, documentation, translation, and UX design.

If you have any questions, you are always welcome to reach me at rpaik@gitlab.com.